Then Gerald said: “O Butterfly, O Gleaming One, your breakfast this day is disappointment, your fork is agony, and your napkin death. O Butterfly, repent truly, abandon falsehood, put away deceit and flattery, cease thinking about your deluded lovers even remorsefully. Repent in verity, do not repent like the wildcat which repents with the fowl in its mouth without putting the fowl down. Where now is the artfulness which was yours, where are the high-hearted, tricked lovers?—To-day all lies in the tomb. This world, O Butterfly, is a market-place: everyone comes and goes, both stranger and citizen. The last of your lovers is a pious friend, he assists the decreed course of this world.” Still, it was rather strange that the body she had chosen appeared to belong to the species _Onithoptera crœsus_,—Gerald decided, as his foot crushed the squeaking soft remnants and rubbed all into a smeared paste of blood and gold-dust,—because, of course, this kind of butterfly was more properly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago than to these parts, over and above the fact that for any butterfly to have the fangs of a serpent was false entomology. However, the geography and local customs and all else which pertained to the Marches of Antan were tinged with some perceptible inconsequence, Gerald reflected, as he returned to his tethered stallion. He mounted then, cheered with the yet further reflection that he had got from Evasherah the rather beautiful idea of being a god, and had got also the four remaining drops from the Churning of the Ocean. The properties of this water were sufficiently well known to every student of magic. PART FOUR THE BOOK OF DERSAM “What Has a Blind Man to Do with Any Mirror?” 10. Wives at Caer Omn NOW Gerald mounted on the stallion Kalki, and Gerald traveled upon the way of gods and myths, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. The land of Dersam was already falling away into desolation, because of the disappearance of its liege-lord into mortal living. And at Caer Omn, which formerly had been the Sylan’s royal palace, and where Gerald got his breakfast, the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines of Glaum were about their cooking and cleaning and nursing, but the seven wives of Glaum sat together in a walled garden. Six of these wives were young and comely, but the seventh seemed—to Gerald’s finding,—as wrinkled as a wet fishnet, and as old as envy.